 CHAPTER VIII. I have just been over the Fram. Captain Amundsen, with his lieutenants, missers Hassel and Wisting, both of whom are accompanying their chief to the pole, were as courteous and attentive as mortals could possibly be. They showed us all that there was to be seen, told us all that there was to be told, and assisted us in snapping everything that tempted our cameras. Nothing could have been more beautiful than the grace and modesty with which they were receiving in the form of a perfect stream of congratulatory cablegrams, the plottets of the world. It was good to walk the decks of this sturdy little vessel that holds the extraordinary record of having penetrated to the farthest north with Nansen and to the farthest south with Amundsen. We raise our hats to the heroic achievements of these hearty Norsemen. What memories rest you mind? What tales of dawnless courage and dogged endurance? Our thoughts quit all their ordinary grooves and plunge into fresh realms. We seem to leave the solar system far behind us and to invade a new universe, as we lean against these beaten bulwarks and give ourselves to retrospection. And here, at least, there are no more worlds to conquer. Here, at any rate, progress has reached finality. There are no more poles, none. It is so very rarely that we can cry, naplu ultra, that we must enjoy the sensation when we can. Pirian and Mundsen hold a distinct monopoly. They are entitled to make the most of it. The magnificent achievement of Captain Amundsen has set us all thinking of Arctic and Antarctic exploits. We have been transported in fancy to those lofty and jagged ranges of mountainous ice that have been the despair of adventurers since exploration began. We have shivered in imagination as we have caught glimpses of innumerable ice floes and of stretching plains of frozen snow. Of Captain Amundsen's success in the south, we know only the bare fact. His book, with graphic detail and description, is a treat with which the future tantalizes us. But Amundsen has reminded us of Piri, and we have picked up the commander's book once more. He tells a great tale. It is good to see that the world cannot withhold its sounding applause from the man who knows exactly where he wants to go and who never dreams of resting till he gets there. Piri's book is a classic of excellent leadership. Manson told us long ago that the obstacles that intervened between civilization and the pole, terrific as they were, were too frail for the dogged and indomitable determination of Piri. That prediction has been magnificently vindicated. Commander Piri has taught us that the really successful man is the man who knows how to keep on failing. Failure is life's high art. He who knows how to fail well will sweep everything before him. Piri kept on failing till the silver crept into his hair, and then, when well over fifty years of age, on stepping stones of his dead self, he climbed to higher things. Through what Disraeli would have called the hell of failure, he entered the heaven of his triumph. It is ever so. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the persistent take it by storm. The conqueror is, as Wellington said, the man who never knows when he is beaten. The dust of defeat stings the face of the victor at every step of his onward march. The arms of the Republic, writes Gibbon, often defeated in battle, were always successful in war. As for God, exclaimed the dying Jacob, a troop shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last. The cross is the last word in the grim record of the world's most ghastly failures. It is at the same time the emblem of a victory which shall shame our most radiant dreams. Those whose ears have never heard a pay in, and whose brows have never felt the laurel, should ponder well this great romance of arctic exploration. When God writes success on any man's life, he often begins to spell it with an F. Commander Peary tabulates his difficulties. Speaking generally, these coincided with Amundsen's, and they were three. One, there was the difficulty, sometimes almost insufferable, of conveying heavy baggage over steep ragged, slippery mountains of ice. Two, there was the difficulty presented by the piercing, penetrating, paralyzing cold. And there was the difficulty of the dense, depressing darkness, the long polar night. In relation to the first of these, however, we must confess that the thought that has haunted us, as we have followed our intrepid voyager, is that really, and truly, these were not the things that he turned, but the things that drove him. Their propelling power was infinitely greater than their propelling power. It is quite certain that if the poles could have been reached in a sumptuous poleman car, neither Peary nor Amundsen would have made the trip. It was the stupendous difficulty that lured them on. We make an agregrious blender when we try to persuade men that the way to heaven is easy. The statement is false to fact in the first place, and in the second there is no responsive chord in human nature which will vibrate to that ignoble note. Hardship has a strange fascination for men. Pizarro knew what he was doing when he traced his line on the sands of Panama, and cried, Comrades, on that side of the line are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death. On this side ease and pleasure. Choose every man. For my part I go to the south. Garibaldi knew what he was doing when he exclaimed, Soldiers, what I offer you is fatigue, danger, struggle, and death. The chill of the cold night in the free air. The intolerable heat beneath the blazing sun. No lodgings, no munitions, no provisions, but forced marches, perilous watch-posts, and the continual struggle with the bayonet against strong batteries. Those who love freedom and their country may follow me. Men love to be challenged and taunted and dared. Six thousand men eagerly volunteered to join Captain Scott's expedition to the South Pole. Some holding high and remunerative positions, craved to be permitted to swap the decks of the Terra Nova. A captain in a crack Calvary regiment, with five clasps on his uniform, a hero of the South African War, counted it in honour to perform the most menial duties at a salary of a shilling a month. Yes, Pizarro and Garibaldi, period Scott, knew what they were doing. They were obeying the surest instinct in the genius of leadership, for they were following him, who said, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me, for whosoever shall save his life shall lose it. But whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. On the road to Golgotha, the Saviour challenged the daring among men, and the heroes of all the ages having consequence tripped to his standard. But the colossal obstacles have often to be surmounted. Here he tells us in the cruel cold, and the dense darkness, and such cold, it is surely an allegory. Many a man feels that the task assigned him would be difficult enough in itself, but in the chilling and disheartening atmosphere in which he has to perform it, it seems impossible. Bad enough thought, but I enough to fight a lion, but a lion in a pit, and a lion in a pit on a snowy day, hard enough to persevere in well-doing when inspired by sweet whispers of gratitude, and cheered by the warm breath of sympathy. But misunderstood and unappreciated. There are millions who have discovered with Piri that life's heaviest loads have to be born in the most nipping and frigid atmosphere. And the darkness, nobody knows what darkness is. Piri tells us unless he has experienced an arctic night. Week after week with no alluming ray, the blackness seems to soak into one's very soul. But here our explorer is mistaken. There are so many who have never been within thousands of miles of the pole who nevertheless take up every morning their heavy burdens and bear them through an atmosphere more chilling than that of arctic latitudes, and amidst darkness compared with which an arctic night is brilliant, for there is no gloom like the petrifying gloom of mystery. The sorrows of all time reached their climax in the Man of Sorrows, and the ambush of the Christ reached its climax on the cross. And in the awful heart of that anguish there was darkness. And out from the darkness emerged the expression of eternal mystery. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Before of the ages it is concentrated in that fearful why. And with its unanswered why, upon his dumb lips, many a Christian follows his Lord in the dark. And the Peer's book is a classic of distinguished leadership. This reminds me of the finest thing in the Valiant. The explorer makes a noble boast. In the course of his life he has led hundreds of men among arctic foxes and polar bears. And, say for shipping accidents, that might have happened in any zone, he has brought them all safely back. There could be no more eloquent testimony to his shrewd foresight, his unfailing diligence, and his almost fond unselfishness. Then that, of nothing is he more proud, but Peer's leadership is modeled on a greater. What though at times burdens of life seem crushing? What though the atmosphere seem paralyzing? What though the darkness seems appalling? He leads on. He has felt the darkness and the cold. The responsibility is, after all, in the last resort upon the leader. And with unhearing wisdom and beautiful accuracy of judgment, he picks out the perilous path and apportions the difficult tasks to the well-known potentialities of his followers. Of those whom thou hast given me, he says, I have lost none. Commander Peer's great book has taught us that the wise leader sets an infinite value on the welfare of his most lowly follower, and that every task is allotted in the light of that lofty estimate. I have been reading a pretty tale of a wee lassie who, on bounding in from school, claimed that she had learned to punctuate. Indeed, exclaimed her mother, and how do you do it, Elsie? Well, Mama, cried the excited little grammarian, it's just as easy as can be. If you say the thing is so, you just put a hat-pin after it. But if you are only asking whether it is so or not, you put a button-hook. On thinking it over, we have reached the deliberate conclusion that there is a world of sound philosophy about this little lassie's explanation. All life resolves itself sooner or later into a matter of hat-pins and button-hooks. If we were to hold a kind of mental spring cleaning, turning out all the drawers of memory and cupboards of thought, if we were to sort out all our notions and ideas, our doctrines and our theories, if we were to overhaul our entire intellectual and moral equipment, we should discover with surprise that the great bulk of it all could be sharply divided under these two heads, our affirmations and our interrogations, the things of which we are positive and the things of which we are doubtful, the matters on which we are dogmatic and the matters on which we are dubious. The soul has a stock and trade of its own, and on its shells are to be found the goods that it has bought outright and the goods of which it has accepted delivery on probation. We carry these two classes of stores, our certainties and our suspicions, these and no others. Our cupboards are crammed, that is to say with hat-pins and with button-hooks. It is in these two classes of goods that the churches do their main business. The church makes great affirmations and she propounds great interrogations. She declares confidently, we know whom we have believed. We know that all things work together for good. We know that if our earthly house were destroyed, we have a house not made with hands eternal in the heavens. She asks great questions too. What shall it profit a man? How shall we escape if we neglect? What shall the end be of those that obey not the gospel? Surely the pulpit is of all places the natural home of stupendous affirmation and searching interrogation. All of her window-homes rushes to the memory at once. I will agree, said number seven, to write the history of two worlds, this and the next, in such a compact way that you cannot commit them both to memory and less time than you can learn the answer to the first question in the catechism. He took a blank card from his pocketbook and wrote, exclamation point, line, question mark. The two worlds, endless doubt and unrest here below, wondering, admiring, adoring, certainty above. Am I not right? It was conceded that he was right. It comes to this. Two worlds can be set forth by a single hatpin and a single buttonhook. Hatpins and buttonhooks are both very good in their way and for their proper purposes. We have heard of hatpins being used with vicious intent at football-batches and in street rides, just as we have heard men speak with certainty where they would have been wiser to have spoken with caution. They were cocksurer, but time has shown that they were wrong. It was an abuse of the hatpin that was all. Have your beliefs, says the old writer, and you have your doubts. Believe your beliefs and doubt your doubts. Never doubt your beliefs and never believe your doubts. It is a quaint way of saying that the hatpin and the buttonhook must be kept each in its proper place and must be used each for its proper purpose. In a significant lecture delivered to students not long before his death, Dr. John Watson urged the importance of this very thing. There are certain matters he contended on which the preacher can be absolutely positive. The facts of revelation, of the deity of the Son of God, of sin, of redemption, and the power of the Holy Ghost. Round these splendid facts he demonstrated there revolved a thousand theories. Between these things he entreated the students to distinguish clearly. The facts, he said, should be declared in faith with much assurance. The theory should be advanced as contributing light with diffidence. The buttonhook, like the hatpin, is a most useful article in its own way. It is a good thing to ask questions. It was the occupation of the child Jesus in the midst of the doctors. Towards the close of his life Dr. Thomas Guthrie wrote a beautiful letter to his daughter congratulating her on her first approach to the table of the Lord. The letter simply overflows with intense affection and fatherly counsel. And it contains this pertinent passage. I saw an adage yesterday in a medical magazine which is well worth your remembering and acting on. It is this wise saying of the great Lord Bacon's Who asked much learns much. I remember the day when I did not like by asking to confess my ignorance. I have long given up that and now seize on every opportunity of adding to my stock of knowledge. Now don't forget Lord Bacon's wise saying. There are only two men in the whole wide world who can ask questions effectively. There is the man who does not know and wants to learn. And there is the man who does know and wants to teach. Of the former Alexander the Great is the classical illustration. Among the latter Socrates stands supreme. We all remember the great passage in Plutarch in which the rise of Alexander is largely attributed to his endless facility for asking sagacious questions. When Frank Buckland, the delightful naturalist, was in his fourth year, his mother wrote of him, he is always asking questions. If there is anything he cannot understand he won't go on till it has been explained to him. There is no end to his questions. And Dr. Kohlross in his exquisite monogram of Kerry tells us how the sensible lad in the leather apron attracted the notice of Dr. Scott the commentator by his modest asking of appropriate questions. The place of the button-hook is permanent. So long his life throbs with mystery the place of the interrogation is assured. The baby asks questions as soon as he can prattle. Why, mother, why? Was those poor black words all baked in a pie? And why did the cow jump right over the moon? And why did the dish run away with the spoon? And why must we wait for our wings till we die? Why, mother, why? And death comes at last and finds us still asking the old questions. Why? This is the cry that echoes through the wilderness of earth through song and sorrow, day of death and birth. Why? Why? It is the high wail of the child with all his life to face. Man's last dumb question as he reaches space. Why? The comfort about it all is that the really big things of life are represented by hatpins and only the things that can afford to wait by button-hooks. Dr. Dale used to illustrate this by a reference to the pillars beside his pulpit. It appears to you, he would say to the congregation at Cars Lane, that these pillars support the arch above my head. They do nothing of the kind. If you could stand where I stand, you would see that they have been cut through to make room for this rostrum and they actually hang upon the arch which they seem to support. In like fashion our faith seems at times to depend upon the theories and evidences concerning which we ask our questions. In point of fact it does nothing of the kind. If all our theories and evidences were cut through like the pillars, our faith would still stand securely like the arch. The certainty infinitely outnumber and outweigh our speculations. We know. The soul plants her feet on a sheer refuge of her own. Professor Forsythe rightly argues that to the individual consciousness there can be no stronger witness than its own experience of the love of God, of the merits of the Saviour's cross and of the efficacy of his risen power. These the soul takes into stock, not on approbation, but forever and for all. She buys these truths and sells them not. The Christian Gospel holds for the believer stupendous and satisfying certainties and amidst these affirmations secure from all interrogations the heart loves to build its nest. End of part three, chapter nine. Hat pins and button hooks. Part three, chapter ten of The Luggage of Life. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Devora Allen. The Luggage of Life. By Frank W. Borum. Part three, chapter ten. The Brow of the Hill. The Brow of the Hill has a divinity of its own. There is something distinctly spiritual as well as something distinctly sublime about a summit. That is why the heathen love to build their altars there. How often in the historical books of the Old Testament we are told that the idolatrous people erected their shrines and raised their images on the high hills about Jerusalem. How the Aztecs delighted in rearing their strange temples, shaped like pyramids, on the loftiest peaks of Mexico, with the altar on the topmost pinnacle of the temple. And the same shore instinct has led men to lay their bones to rest on the Brow of the Hill. They wearily sought its silent and solemn sanctity at the last. We have all visited, at least in fancy, the resting place of Robert Louis Stevenson. Nothing more picturesque can be imagined, his cousin tells us, than the narrow ledge that forms the summit of Vea, a place no wider than a room, and as flat as a table. On either side, the land descends precipitously. In front lies the vast ocean with the surf-swept reefs. To the right and left, green mountains rise, densely covered with the primeval forest. No firearms must be discharged about those slopes. The chiefs insist that the birds must be undisturbed, that they may raise about his grave the songs he loved so well. I saw the other day a striking picture of Cecil Rhodes' lonely grave on the crest of the mighty Matapos in Africa. Two lions from the valley beneath are standing on the great flat tomb, seem in harmony with the wild, romantic place. But I no longer hold the attention of my readers. Their thoughts have left Robert Louis Stevenson and Cecil Rhodes far behind, and have visited the strange, lone resting place of Moses among the mountains of Moab. That was the grandest funeral that ever passed on earth. But no man heard the trampling or saw the train go forth. Perhaps the bald old eagle on gray Beth Peor's height out of his rocky iry looked on the wondrous sight. And Browning has expressed same fondness for a mountain burial in his Grammarian's funeral. Here's the top peak, the multitude below, live for they can, there. This man decided not to live, but no, bury this man there. Here, here's his place where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go, let joy break with the storm, peace let the dew send. Lofty designs must close in like effects, loftily lying, leave him still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying. Now I have simply pointed to these altars and monuments that deck the hill-tops of the world in order to prove that there exists in the very blood of the race and reverence for the brow of the hill. We feel that summits are sacred. Why, that is the question. Let us investigate. Now, in attempting a solution of this alluring mystery, I must call to my aid two gentlemen of rare insight and of profound scholarship, Professor George Adam Smith and Mr. A. C. Benson. In treating of the 121st Psalm, the learned principle says, to the Psalmist, the mountains spread a threshold for a divine arrival. Up there, God himself may be felt to be afoot. Whether we climb them or gaze at them, the mountains produce in us that mingling of moral and physical emotion in which the temper of true worship consists. So much for the principle. Now for the schoolmaster. It is good, writes Mr. Benson in one of his delightful essays, It is good for the body to climb the steep slopes and breathe the pure air. It is good for the mind to see the map of the country fairly unrolled before the eye. And it is good for the soul, too, to see the world lie extended at one's feet. How difficult it is to analyze the vague and poignant emotions which then and thus arise. A hilltop, remarks another writer, is a moral as well as Now it is as clear as clear can be that the hunger of our hearts for the hills is only a part of the hunger of our hearts for the infinite. The instinct of the far horizon is indelibly engraven in our very nature. Go where you will, visit what city you like, and you will straightway be taken to some noble and commanding eminence to see the view. Surely this phenomenon requires some explanation. Even the most intelligent of the lower animals betray no love for the landscape. They know nothing of the passion of the far horizon. I have often ascended Mount Wellington at Hobart and gazed entranced upon the magnificent panorama of land and sea that unrolls itself in altogether indescribable grandeur at one's feet. The prospect is almost overpowering. But I have noticed repeatedly that whilst every member of the party turns in ecstasy to admire so glorious a landscape, the horses and dogs, man's most intelligent and sagacious companions, have deliberately turned their backs upon the magnificent landscape to forage for food on the bushy slopes nearby. The different behaviour of the men and the animals is much more than a matter of degree. It is a contrast in kind. It is a direct line of cleavage. It is arresting and inviting. In one of his most captivating and suggestive passages, Mark Rutherford, in his Revolution in Tanner's Lane, tells how the boys of the tiny Hamlet of Cowfold would, on a holiday, trudge the three dusty miles down the lane from the village to the main coach road and back again, just for the rapture of reading the wondrous words, to London, to York, on the finger post at the end of the lane. The romance of the mysterious fingers immediately down the winding road along which the coaches rattled on their way to the great capitals was an opening into infinity to use Mark Rutherford's words to the boys of Cowfold. It was the next best thing to a mountain peak. It is so with every boy. The instinct of the far horizon burns within him. He reads Jules Verne and R. M. Valentine, Captain Marriott and Gordon Stables. These are his classics. He glories in boundless plains and impenetrable jungles, in pathless prairies and endless snows, in trackless deserts and in limitable oceans. He revels in a limitless landscape. His fertile fancy converts every hen coop and dog kennel into a wigwam or a crawl, every paddock into a prairie, every terrier into a tiger, and the boys of every neighboring school into a fierce and hostile tribe. He is always on an imaginary hilltop, looking out upon the four corners of the earth. He loathes the intimate and loves the infinite. There is evidently some subtle and mysterious ingredient in his composition that is totally absent in the makeup of your noblest horses and your finest dogs. The passion of the wide horizon, the instinct of the infinite, the spirit of the summit tingles in his very blood. Yet, after all, it must be sorrowfully confessed that the hilltops never really satisfy. The horizon is always small, the landscape limited. We look out to sea and we wonder what ships are sailing out there beyond the skyline. We gaze across the land and we wonder what lies beyond the distant ranges. The peak is high and flushed at its highest with sunrise fire. The peak is high and the stars are high, but the thought of man is higher. Yet be quite sure that the hunger that the highest peak leaves unsatisfied is no mockery. It is to appease it that the churches live. For there is another hilltop. Then said the shepherds one to another, let us here show to the pilgrims the gates of the celestial city. The pilgrims then lovingly accepted the motion. So they had them to the top of a high hill called Clear and gave them their glass to look. And they saw some of the glory of the place. Then they went away and sang this song. Thus by the shepherds secrets are revealed, which from all other men are kept concealed. Come to the shepherds then, if you would see, things deep, things hid, and that mysterious be. Let all the shepherds of all the flocks take note. The hunger for the hilltop is a very real and a very beautiful thing. It is not satisfied by rearing altars there. It is not appeased by planning, like Stevenson and Rhodes, to lie in stately silence there. There is no mountain peak among the earth's loftiest ranges high enough to gratify the cravings of a single soul. The view is so restricted. Men are hungry for the wealthier vision that is to be seen from the summit of the hill called Clear and it is for the shepherds to take these wistful pilgrims there. End of Part 3, Chapter 10 End of The Luggage of Life by Frank W. Borum